Oil: A Love Story
Thursday, November 12th
Doors & drinks @ 6:30, Program @ 7:00 p.m.
Free and open to the public
Beer & wine available for purchase throughout the night

Intermedia Arts
2822 South Lyndale Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55408

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Solutions Twin Cities is partnering with 4 academics from The University of Minnesota to produce a very special event at Intermedia Arts. The topic? Oil. Rich, dark, beautiful oil.

Like it or not, we are a society in love with oil. This event traces the historical origins and political consequences of our love for oil, and the prospects of falling out of love into a post-petroleum future. This fast-paced, media-rich program will combine 4 captivating short presentations with participatory games and new social technology to examine the subject of oil from many vantage points. The audience will be encouraged to interact and contribute in a variety of ways throughout the course of the evening.

Please join us for a thought-provoking and surprising evening filled with entertaining insights into the how and the why things are the way they are, and what people are doing to change them.

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Along with a few surprises, the event will showcase four 10-minute presentation about our love/hate relationship with oil:

OIL SCIENCE THEATER - George Henderson
We begin with highlights from the oil-promotional films of the 1950s. They’re fun to watch and easy to laugh at. They’re also terribly close to home. (Hey, what’s that in your popcorn?) To see these films now is to look back and watch a habit forming. And not only that: it’s to viscerally grasp the early chapters of peculiarly enduring love story, the long-term partnership between oil consumption and the very idea of “Americanness.” George has been teaching in the Geography Department at the University of Minnesota since 2001. In 2006, curious about—and fed up with—his ignorance of oil, he began teaching a course on the subject.

OIL AS A WAY OF LIFE - Matt Huber
Oil is a source of power central to cultural notions of 'the American way of life.' Propelling the dispersed flow of bodies throughout suburban landscapes, oil powers American values such of freedom, mobility and domesticity. Yet, oil also makes possible a form of privatized life, and enables a politics of privatism expressed in disdain for notions of 'the public', e.g. government, taxes, socials spending. Matt is a visiting Quadrant Fellow at the University of Minnesota. He recently finished his dissertation on oil and the history of American capitalism.

OIL AND THE "TECHNOLOGICAL UNCONSCIOUS" - Bruce Braun
Scientific facts and moral appeals are insufficient to solve climate change because we fail to realize how thoroughly our machines remake who we are and what we love. Through video of Al Gore and others driving cars and insights from the neurological sciences we can begin to see that the act of driving transforms what our bodies are, what they can do, and the pleasures they experience. Bruce writes and teaches on the environment, technology and culture at the University of Minnesota. He loves driving, even though he knows better.

PEAK OIL: IMAGINING AND PLANNING THE POST-CARBON WORLD - Matthew Schneider-Mayerson
Over the last decade, a community of individuals concerned about oil scarcity has coalesced into the peak oil movement, a broad-based subculture obsessed with the the inevitability of oil scarcity leading to societal collapse. Although a marginal group comprised of oil industry workers, apocalyptic "doomers,"and communal optimists, peak oilers actively prepare for a world without oil, and thus offer a number of possibilities for a post-carbon, low-energy future. Through a glimpse into a thriving subculture, we begin to search for "transitions" from our national and personal dependence on petroleum. Matthew is a graduate student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is writing a dissertation about the peak oil movement's relation to contemporary social movements and American politics.

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EVENT PARTNERS
+ Institute for Global Studies, University of Minnesota
+ Human/Nonhuman Research Collaborative, Institute for Advanced Study, University of Minnesota
+ Finnegans Irish Amber